Berner did tell him when we were still on the porch and cicadas had started working in the trees, that strange people had been driving past our house and there’d been phone calls where no one talked. The people who’d driven past, she believed, were Indians. My father just said, “Oh, those boys are all right. Don’t worry about them. They don’t understand the white man’s ways. They’re fine, though.”
I asked him about the business he’d been prospecting after. He said that was all working out perfectly, but he needed to go back soon to settle things, and maybe I’d go with him this time. We could all go. I asked if what he’d said on Sunday was true—that we might be moving to another town. I was still fretting about school, the chess club, etc., the things I had a stake in. He smiled and said no, we wouldn’t be moving. It was time for our family to settle down and Berner and I should make some friends and live like respectable citizens. He looked forward to success at his job selling ranch property. He’d teach me the tricks of that as soon as he learned them, though I didn’t see how this squared with a new business opportunity. I thought about asking him why he’d taken his pistol on a business trip. But I didn’t because I didn’t think he’d tell me the real reasons. Thinking about it now, none of what he was saying seemed the least bit true to me. I just knew I was supposed to believe it. Children get as good at pretending as adults.
When we ate dinner it was after ten thirty. I was sleepy and not hungry anymore. The telephone rang two more times while we were at the table. One time my father answered and laughed heartily and said he’d call whoever it was later. The other time he stood and listened as if someone was talking seriously to him. When he came back he said, “Nothing, that was nothing. Just a follow-up.”
At the table our mother asked him if he’d noticed anything different about Berner. He certainly had, he said. Her hair looked better and he liked it. She pointed out that Berner was wearing lipstick—which she was, again—and if we didn’t watch out she’d run away to Hollywood or France. My father said Berner could go up to the Sisters of Providence with our mother and arrange to become a nun with a vow of chastity—which made my mother laugh, but not Berner. I remember that night, now, as the best, most natural time our family had that summer—or any time. Just for a moment, I saw how life could go forward on a steadier, more reliable course. The two of them were happy and comfortable with each other. My father appreciated the way my mother behaved toward him. He paid her compliments about her clothes and her appearance and her mood. It was as if they’d discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They caught a glimpse of the person they fell in love with, and who sustained life. For some, that vision must never dim—as is true of me. But it was odd that our parents should catch their glimpse, and have frustration, anxiety and worry pass away like clouds dispersing after a storm, refind their best selves, but for that glimpse to happen just before leading our family to ruin.
I will say this about our father. All during that night when we were a family, laughing, joking, eating—ignoring what was hanging over us—his features had changed again. When he’d left home two days before, he’d looked fleshy and exhausted. His features had been loose and indistinct and washed out—as if his every step was reluctant and unpracticed. But when he came back that night and strode around the house declaring on what interested him—satellites, South American politics, organ transplants, how all our lives could be better—his features looked sharpened and chiseled. In the grainy light above our supper table, he’d become intent and precise-looking. Our father had small hazel eyes—light brown disks you wouldn’t pay attention to. They would’ve seemed weak eyes because he squinted when he smiled. And since his face was big boned, his eyes were often lost in the overall effect. However, at our dinner table his face now seemed to be about his eyes, as if they saw a world they hadn’t before. They gleamed. When he looked at me with these eyes, I at first felt good and positive. But eventually I became uncomfortable. It was as if he was reappraising everything, as when he’d roamed around the rooms in our house two hours before and seemed to be seeing them for the first time, and was taking a new interest in them. It had made the house feel foreign to me, as if he was planning a use for it that it hadn’t had. His eyes made me feel the same way.
During all these years I’ve thought about his eyes, and how they became so different. And since so much was about to change because of him, I’ve thought possibly that a long-suppressed potential in him had suddenly worked itself into visibility on his face. He was becoming who and what he was always supposed to be. He’d simply had to wear down through the other layers to who he really was. I’ve seen this phenomenon in the faces of other men—homeless men, men sprawled on the pavement in front of bars or in public parks or bus depots, or lined up outside the doors of missions, waiting to get in out of a long winter. In their faces—plenty of them were handsome, but ruined—I’ve seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves. It’s a theory of destiny and character I don’t like or want to believe in. But it’s there in me like a hard understory. I don’t, in fact, ever see such a ruined man without saying silently to myself: There’s my father. My father is that man. I used to know him.
Chapter 12
Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.
After Berner and I had gone to bed on the Wednesday night my father returned, I listened to my parents in the kitchen, talking, laughing, washing dishes. The noise of water running. The clatter of plates and silverware. A cabinet opening and clicking closed. Their softened voices.
“Nobody would ever think . . .” my father said, then I couldn’t hear the rest.
“Do you want to make a family outing out of it?” my mother said. The water went on, then off. It was her more sarcastic voice.
“Nobody would ever think,” he said again. Then my name. “Dell.”
“You’re not. No,” she said.
“Okay.” Dried plates being stacked.
“So, are you happy?” Too loud for me not to hear.
“What’s happy got to do with it?”
“Everything. Absolutely.”
And this was my dream: running out in my pajamas into the kitchen light, where they were standing, looking at me. My tall father—his small eyes still gleaming. My tiny mother in her white pedal pushers and pretty green blouse with green buttons. A face of grave concern. “I’m going,” I say. Fists clenched. Face damp. Heart pounding. My parents begin to recede in my vision, as when you’re sick and fever shrinks the world and distance lengthens. My parents grew smaller and smaller until I was in the harshly lit kitchen alone, and they were at the vanishing point, just about to disappear.
Chapter 13
I slept late on Thursday, from having been up and hearing them move around in the night. Our mother came in my room at eight—her glasses, her face soft and peering, close to my face, her small cool hand touching my bare shoulder. Her breath smelled sweet with Ipana and sour with tea. The door to my room stood open. Our father’s figure passed by it. He was wearing blue jeans and a plain white shirt and his Acmes.
“Your sister’s had breakfast. There’s Cream of Wheat for you.” Her eyes were focused on my face, as if she saw something unexpected there. “We have to go away for a day. We’ll be back tomorrow. It’ll be a good experience for you two to look after things.” Her face was calm. She’d made her mind up on something.
Our father stopped in the doorway, his hair combed and shiny. He was shaved. My room smelled like his talcum. He was very tall in the empty door space.
“You and your sister don’t answer the phone,” he said. “And don’t go anywhere. We’ll be back tomorrow evening. This’ll be good experience for you.”
“Where’re you going?” I gazed up at the sunl
ight behind him in the living room, my eyes burning from too little sleep.
“I have some more business. I mentioned it,” he said. “I need your mother’s opinion.” He was talking softly, but I could see a vein in his forehead was prominent.
She looked at him—as if she hadn’t heard this before. She was kneeling beside my bed, her fingers lightly on my chest. “That’s right,” she said.
“Can we go with you?” I said.
“We’ll take you next time,” he said.
My dream passed in my mind. I’m going. Shouting. Fists clenched.
“Look after your sister.” He smiled knowingly. “She’s under Colonel Parsons’ jurisdiction here.” He made a joke out of things if he could.
“Are you going to shoot somebody?”
“Oh my God,” my mother said.
My father’s large mouth, which had been smiling, fell open. He squinted—as if a glaring light had been switched on. “Why would you say that?”
“He knows,” my mother said. She stood beside my bed and stared down at me, as if I was to blame for something. I didn’t know anything.
“What do you think you know, Dell?” My father’s smile resumed its activity across his face. He seemed understanding.
“You took your pistol last time.”
He took a step forward into my room. “Oh. People carry guns out here. That’s common. It’s the Wild West. You don’t ever shoot anybody.”
My mother was looking at me steadily. Her small eyes were intent behind her spectacles, as if she was studying me for some sign. She was sweating under her blouse—I smelled it. It was already hot in the house.
“Are you afraid?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“He’s not afraid,” my father said, and stepped out of the doorway and looked toward the clock in the kitchen. “We need to go.” He disappeared into the hall.
My mother continued to stare at me, as if I’d become a person she didn’t completely know.
“Think of some wonderful place you’d like to go, why don’t you?” she said. “I’ll take you there. You and Berner.”
The front screen slapped shut. “He’s under Colonel Parsons’ jurisdiction here,” I heard him say. He was talking to Berner on the porch.
“Moscow,” I said. I’d read in Chess Master that great players came from Russia. Mikhail Tal—who was famous for his sacrificing style and terrible stare. Alexander Alekhine—noted for his aggressiveness. I’d looked Moscow up in the Merriam-Webster, and then in the World Book, and finally on the globe on the dresser in my room. I didn’t know what the Soviet Union was, or why it was different from Russia. Lenin, who my father said played chess, had played a part in it. And Stalin. Men he despised. He said Stalin had put Roosevelt in the grave the same as if he’d shot him.
“Moscow!” my mother said. “My poor father would have a heart attack. I was thinking of Seattle.”
The Chevrolet horn honked in the street. I heard the screen door close again. Berner was coming back inside, ready to take care of me. “His pot’s boiling over,” I heard her say. My mother leaned forward, kissed me quickly on my forehead. “We can talk about it when I get back,” she said. Then she left.
When we lived in Mississippi, in Biloxi—which was in 1955, when I was eleven—my father worked at the base there and stayed home on the weekends, the way he did in Great Falls. He liked Mississippi. It was close to where he’d grown up, and he liked the Gulf of Mexico. If he’d left the Air Force then and there, instead of when he did, things would’ve worked out better for him and for our mother. They could’ve gotten divorced and gone their separate ways. Children can make their adjustments if their parents love them. And ours did.
My father often took me to the movies on Saturday mornings when there was something he wanted to see or had nothing else to do. There was an air-cooled theater called the Trixy, which was on the downtown main street that ended at the Gulf. The movies started at ten and lasted straight until four, with shorts and cartoons and features running continuously, all for a single admission, which was fifty cents. We would sit through everything, eating candy and popcorn and drinking Dr Peppers, enjoying Tarzan or Jungle Jim and Johnny McShane and Hopalong Cassidy, plus the Stooges and Laurel and Hardy and newsreels and old war footage, which my father liked. We’d emerge at four out of the cool, back into the hot, salty, breathless Gulf coast afternoon, sun-blind and queasy and speechless from wasting the day with nothing to show for it.
On one such morning, we were there in the dark side-by-side, and onto the screen had come a newsreel from the 1930s, relating to the criminals Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who’d terrorized (the announcer said) several states of the Southwest, robbing and killing and making an infamous name until they were killed in an ambush on a country road in Louisiana, by a posse of deputies who shot them from the bushes and brought their careers to an end. They were only in their twenties.
Later, when my father and I walked out into the steamy, sun-shot afternoon—it was June—our eyes hurting, our heads dull, we found that someone (the Trixy’s operators) had parked a long flatbed truck in front of the theater. On the truck bed was an old gray Ford four-door from the ’30s, and all over it were shiny holes, and its windows were busted out, its doors and hood perforated, its tires deflated. Up beside the car wheel was a painted sign that read: ACTUAL BONNIE & CLYDE DEATH CAR—WILL PAY $10,000 IF YOU PROVE IT’S NOT. The proprietors had placed a set of wooden steps up to the car, and the theater customers were invited to pay fifty cents to climb up and inspect it, as if Bonnie and Clyde were still inside dead, and everyone should see them.
My father stood on the hot hard concrete, peering up at the car and the customers—kids and grown-ups, women and men—filing past, gawking, making jokes and machine-gun noises and laughing. He didn’t intend to pay. He said the car was a fakeroo, or it would never be there. The world didn’t work that way. Plus it was fresh painted, and the bullet holes didn’t look real. He’d seen bullet holes on plenty of airplanes, and they were bigger, more jagged. Not that this would stop anybody from throwing their money away.
But when we’d stood on the sidewalk, looking up at the car for a few minutes, he said, “Would you become a bank robber, Dell? It’d be exciting. Wouldn’t that surprise your mother?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said, looking speculatingly up at the gleaming holes and all the country yokels peeping in the car windows and yowling and grinning.
“Are you sure?” he said. “I could give it a try. I’d be smarter than these two, though. You don’t use your noggin, you end up a piece of Swiss cheese. Your mother’d take this wrong, of course. You don’t need to relate it to her.” He pulled me closer to him. His shirt smelled starchy in the sunlight. We walked on then into the afternoon.
I never told my mother, and never even thought of it until long after the day my sister and I stood on the front porch and watched our parents drive away to rob a bank. I didn’t put those things together then, though later I did. It was a thing he’d always wanted to do. Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.
Chapter 14
What I know of the actual bank robbery itself I mostly know from my mother’s chronicle, and from issues of the Great Falls Tribune, which I’ve already said took the view that the event was a comic, cautionary tale it was the newspaper’s duty to bring before the public eye. Though I have also constructed the robbery in my head—fascinated that it should’ve been our parents who committed it, so ridiculous and inexplicable as to make the reportable facts inadequate as an explanation.
Conceivably many of us think of robbing a bank the same way we lie in bed at night and dedicatedly plot to murder our life-long enemy; fitting together complicated parts of a plan, adjusting the details, reaching back to reconcile earlier calculations with late-occurring possibilities for being caught. Eventually, we find ourselves facing the one unerasable problem in logic that our cleverness can’t work out all the way. Afte
r which we conclude that though it’s satisfying to think we could murder our enemy in ambush (since it needs to be done), only a deranged or suicidal person would carry out such a plan. That is because the world is set against such acts. And in any case we’re amateurs at the business of scheming and plotting and murdering, and don’t have the concentration needed to defeat what the world is so set against. At which point we forget about our plan and go to sleep.
To succeed, my parents would’ve had to realize their car would be recognized immediately. My father’s blue jumpsuit would be identified as Air Force issue—even minus its insignias. The unfaded mark of previous captain’s bars would be easily noticed. My father’s good looks and obliging southern accent and manners would be memorable to everyone in a North Dakota bank. The fact that he had mentioned his wish to rob a bank to several people at the base in Great Falls would be recollected (though he intended it as a joke). Our parents would’ve also had to realize that contrary to my father’s intuition, people who rob banks don’t blend into the population, but stand out because they’ve become something or someone different from who they were and from everybody else—even if they don’t realize it. For all these reasons, discovering who robbed a bank quickly begins not to be difficult at all.